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Notes -
Are food allergies another aspect of the culture war? I was reading Reddit and a person was feeding 100 people and someone mentioned to make sure you have all the allergies/food restrictions covered. Being honest I’ve never met anyone with a food restriction I can think of except a lot of brown friends who won’t eat sausage but also have no problem with alcohol.
Ancient religions had a lot of restrictions, now Im borrowing this from elsewhere that the rise of food restrictions is just the same thing as ancients banning certain foods as holy acts. I’ve long argued that the culture wars are less of a culture war and more of a religious war and dietary restrictions are just a modern form of Jews and Muslims banning pork/shellfish etc and Catholics not eating meat on fridays. All religions seem to have focuses on eating and sexual rituals.
I know mental illness has far higher rates amongst lefties. My guess is dietary restrictions and food allergies are much higher in lefties and if your not in that religion it’s something you never think of.
Maybe slightly, just because a lot of leftist I know are a bit neurotic and hypochondriac. Food "sensitivities" are very trendy among them, and they obsess over their state of the mind and body after ingesting seemingly random ingredients that have been brought to their attention, like gluten, soy or nightshades. Then they draw all sorts of spurious conclusions between a food item and some vague, probably psychosomatic phenomena like "brain fog", "bloating" or "gas".
Where as I just laugh about getting death farts after a night of terrible decisions.
But I think you also just notice red tribers with restrictions less, because to them it's nobody else's business. They avoid what they have to avoid, and don't expect the entire world to cater to their diet. Blue tribers seem to think the world revolves around them, and if they can't eat absolutely every food item at a pot luck, nobody should.
Arguing that food sensitivity is a trendy affection popular in lefty circles is... okay, I guess. I can't even say I disagree. Anecdotal observations, even slightly cherrypicked ones, are fine.
But of course you had to finish with a bit of pure culture warring boo outgroup. You've been warned often enough now that it should not surprise you that "Boo blue tribe, so narcissistic and entitled, amirite?" is going to get you another warning. You seem to be determined to keep doing this because you just can't help yourself when there's an opportunity to poke your outgroup in the eye (and, I expect, you will complain again about being told not to do it), so do not pretend to be surprised when your already lengthy record of warnings turns into a ban.
He's right though.
Laughing about the pussification of the Blue Tribe seems strange at a time when they run the world, are winning so much that they are tired of winning, and their opponents have basically given up to the point where their best hope is for the Blue Tribe to self-destruct in a woke-stupid dumpster fire (admittedly a highly plausible outcome). But the basic error isn't new - people were talking about how wealth made the British soft before, during, and after the peak extent of the British Empire. More recently, people were using "they/them army" memes to explain why Russia would win in Ukraine.
What's the alternative to laughing though? Aside from the Hemingway impression forever whispering sweet nothings to me from the sidelines.
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so totally free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
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One angle of this is that the "winning" is the successful weaponization of said pussification. Crybullying. In other words, being a contemptible, pathetic pussy, and leaning hard into modern civilizational norms that reward being a pathetic pussy and deny any normal consequences. Attacking their social status is at least an actionable plan, until you can coordinate sufficient meanness to atomic wedgie the woke into oblivion.
Obviously there's a huge incentive to overgeneralize here, clearly there is more to Blue success than just sobbing about their sandy bussy until bureaucrats give in to their demands. But it's also not an imaginary phenomenon, it's an archetypal deployment of Slave Morality, which has a solid track record in the West. "Laughing at the pussification" seems useful to the extent that it's a search for an effective immune response to slave morality concern troll crybullying.
The crybullying only works at an individual level because the Blues have already won at the social level. Institutional rules that reward crybullying are imposed top-down by people who achieved power when the norms did not favour crybullying.
The bottom-up norms of the Blue Tribe treat white women’s tears - i.e. Blue elites and aspirant-elites crybullying each other - as almost as worthy of contempt as men’s tears.
Another way of thinking about it is that crybullying only works if you are a designated Blue client group. (The Red Tribe often try crybullying the Blues, and it doesn’t work). Crybullying culture only appeared when the Blues were powerful enough to have client groups.
I disagree. I think it works because it exploits values most people have - like compassion, justice, kindness, sense of belonging, desire to protect the weak - and weaponizes it to goals completely alien to these values. Most people do not have innate immunity for that, at least not yet. It's like the virus getting into the cell - it uses its own resources for the goals that have nothing to do with the goals the cell is for. Most non-tribers and red-tribers do not know what to do if somebody attacks them with "here's some oppressed people and either you do exactly what I say or you're the oppressor" - and most people do not want to be the oppressors. That's where the crybullying gets its power - from the desire of people to be good and fear of people to fail to be good, which is successfully weaponized.
Because Red Tribe's values make for them very hard to weaponize compassion. The tribe that values individual strength, individual responsibility, individual merit and individual freedom would find it hard to convincingly pretend to be a helpless victim of circumstances and evil conspiracies. It's hard for them to pretend to be an innocent victim convincingly enough for the feelings of sympathy to overwhelm logical defenses. They are not ambush predators by nature. So copying a strategy that was not designed for them is not going to work very well. You can't have a spider and a hawk to hunt the same way.
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